


beyond blood

by ShowMeAHero



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Families of Choice, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Ghouls, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27692135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShowMeAHero/pseuds/ShowMeAHero
Summary: Ciri doesn’t answer. She’s being suspiciously silent, actually, and it gives Geralt an edge of nervousness, like he’s made a misstep.“If you don’t like it, we can try a different weapon,” Geralt suggests. “I thought it might be time to take you on a contracted hunt.” Ciri’s head snaps up, teary eyes fixed on him, and he adds, “Nothing complicated or dangerous. Just to introduce you to it.”Ciri finally moves, throwing herself into his lap, her arms locked tight around his neck. She says, voice so excited it nearly breaks, “Thank you so much, Father.”
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 30
Kudos: 246





	beyond blood

**Author's Note:**

> okay this is based off a tumblr post i made that said ["the first time ciri calls geralt “dad” jaskier cries for a whole day, but the first time she calls jaskier “dad” he cries for three."](https://andillwriteyouatragedy.tumblr.com/post/635392415499485184/the-first-time-ciri-calls-geralt-dad-jaskier) somehow that post became this monstrosity, enjoy!!

Geralt has an old habit. He doesn’t like to call it theft, so he doesn’t. Jaskier calls it “pilfering at best,” and Geralt wouldn’t even go that far.

It’s just that dead people don’t have any use for their things, and Geralt does. So what if he loots their stuff after they’ve already passed, whether it was at the end of his blade or not? Even if he stumbles upon an abandoned camp, it’s not like anything’s being used.

Anyways, most of the things he finds are just the last dregs of potions, the odds and ends of plant ingredients, a few discarded and mostly-broken weapons. A lot of stuff he just leaves behind. There’s no point to carrying all that nonsense he doesn’t need, not when he could easily forage for anything he needed that he hasn’t already brewed or packed himself.

Jaskier carries enough unnecessary nonsense for the both of them, anyways. Spices and oils and soaps and perfumes and all sorts of things that rattle together in his bag. Geralt doesn’t understand it.

It’s usually a free-for-all when he’s looting dead people’s things, regardless.

Today, Geralt pauses.

In a trunk, he’s found several loose bundles of fabric. There’s balled-up threads of many different colors, a bunch of needles all scattered. When Geralt pushes aside the fabrics, he finds they’re all sorts of materials. There’s the usual cotton and linen, but there’s also a few stretches of completely untouched silk.

Geralt looks over his shoulder. Nobody’s nearby; when he focuses even harder, his senses can’t feel anyone that would be in the realm of close enough to see him. Turning back to the trunk, he pushes all the fabrics back inside and flips the lid all the way open.

The rest of the camp has been torn apart, just the same as the trunks around him. He makes quick work of the rest of it — straightens up what he can to get it out of the way of other travelers, packs a bear fur and unbroken jars of ground ribleaves — before he makes to lift the trunk and go.

He looks to the ground and hesitates.

One of the corpses abandoned on the ground, half-rotted from weeks in the hot sun, still has a sheath attached to her shin. Geralt drops the trunk and kneels down to examine it.

The handle is fine, inlaid with pretty little jewels. It’s something Jaskier would coo over, if he was here. As it is, Geralt balances it on his fingers, tests the weight of it. The thing is too small for his hand, but it’d be perfect for Ciri’s. He’s been thinking of taking her on a contract soon, just to start showing her the ropes, bringing her into real action. She’ll need a good, sharp weapon for it, and if they don’t have to pay for it, more’s the better.

Geralt unbuckles the sheath and replaces the dagger inside, settling the weapon inside the trunk and latching the entire thing shut. It has handles on either end, so he just hoists one up and starts to drag the thing in the dusty dirt, heading back towards the spot hidden deep in the woods where he’d left Ciri and Jaskier at.

Their camp isn’t far from where Geralt had found the dead bandits’ abandoned site. He’ll get them moving on again in the morning, just to put a comfortable distance in between them and whoever or whatever killed the bandits, but he doesn’t hear anything close enough to be a threat tonight. He can meditate, Jaskier and Ciri can rest. They’ll be glad they don’t have to walk anymore today.

He hears Roach first, same as usual when he comes back to them. She snorts for him, and he can hear her heartbeat calm and steady over Jaskier’s and Ciri’s, which kick up when they realize he’s come back. Jaskier’s boots slide across leaves and pine needles and loose dirt, closer and closer until he’s in Geralt’s line of sight.

“There you are,” Jaskier exclaims. Geralt barely has enough time to drop the trunk and get his arms up before Jaskier’s running and leaping up at him.

“You have to stop doing this,” Geralt says. Jaskier kisses his lips, his cheek, the space between his eyes; Geralt holds him easily, hands wrapped around his strong thighs, keeping him upright. “One of these days, I won’t catch you.”

“That’s shit and you know it,” Jaskier says. He frames Geralt’s face in his hands and kisses him right on the nose before wriggling to get down and investigate the trunk.

“Where’s Ciri?” Geralt asks.

“Can’t you smell her or something?” Jaskier asks, clearly deflecting.

Geralt frowns, looking down at him suspiciously. He can hear Ciri’s heartbeat nearby, can hear her hands grazing bark, maybe—

“So, what’s in here?” Jaskier asks. His voice is louder than Ciri’s footfalls and her pulse, which is only more suspicious, when Geralt thinks about it. Jaskier breaks the trunk latch apart and snaps the thing open. “Oh! Look at all this— You’ve found so many clothes! This looks so  _ fine,  _ Geralt.”

“They’re not clothes,” Geralt tells him. “Just fabric. There’s needles and thread, too.”

Jaskier gasps, falling to his knees so he can root through the trunk. Geralt lifts his head, scenting the air. Ciri’s closer, he can smell the soap Jaskier insists she use; her footfalls have come even closer, but they’re not on the ground. Geralt turns slightly, tilting his head so he can hear better. Underneath Ciri’s soft sounds, Jaskier’s still delightedly sorting through the trunk.

“And you’ve found such a lovely little dagger!” Jaskier exclaims. A weight lands on Geralt’s back from the trees, and he whirls to grab the back of Ciri’s tunic, hauling her off of his shoulders.

“No,  _ no!”  _ she cries, kicking out at him. Geralt holds her away from him by the scruff of her neck like she’s a puppy; she whacks him with her wooden sword, then reaches out with one fist, grabbing onto his hair and yanking. He drops her with a curse, and she scrambles between his legs to get behind him and kick him in the backs of the knees so he’ll fall down to them.

“Alright, alright, don’t break your father, we need him to catch us supper,” Jaskier interrupts them. The flat of Ciri’s practice sword bops Geralt in the back of the head as he climbs back to his feet. “And look at all these wonderful things he’s brought! I can stitch you such a fine dress, Princess—”

“Where am I going to wear a  _ dress?”  _ Ciri demands. Geralt reaches into the trunk for the dagger in its sheath. On the way, Jaskier gives him a look that clearly says  _ help me.  _ Geralt glances to Ciri, then back to Jaskier.

“She has a point,” Geralt says. Jaskier rolls his eyes.

“Then I’ll make you both matching silk tunics in this pink silk, how does that sound?” Jaskier suggests.

“I’ll wear the green, but not the pink,” Ciri tells him. “You like pink more than I do, you can have it.”

Jaskier clutches his hands to his heart, then reaches out to pull Ciri in, kissing her all over the top of her head. She shoves at him and protests, but not as hard as Geralt knows she’s capable of. In the end, she ends up sitting in Jaskier’s lap anyways as he keeps sorting through the trunk. Geralt fiddles with the dagger, unsure of how to give it to her now that he’s lost his opening.

“What’re you just standing up there for, dearheart, get down here,” Jaskier instructs him, motioning him down by his side, patting the dirt beside him. Geralt hesitates, then decides to just obey, shedding his swords and sitting in the dust beside them.

“Will you wear green?” Ciri asks him. She has a scrap of the fabric held tight in her fist, rubbing it on her cheek. When she offers it up to him, he takes it between his gloved fingers.

“Hmm.” Geralt turns the fabric over in his fingers. It nearly falls, so slippery and loose between the leather. When she prods him to feel it with his cheek like she had, he takes a long moment before doing it, just to see her push it up at him expectantly again. It  _ is  _ soft, she’s right. It’d make better clothes for Jaskier than for himself, but he knows Jaskier’s going to make him something anyways. He always does.

“Is that a yes?” Ciri asks.

“Of course he’ll wear it, look at how much he likes it,” Jaskier tells her. He glances down at Geralt’s hands. In a moment, there’s a flicker of a smile on his face, his eyes darting back up to meet Geralt’s. “And what have you got there, dearheart? Something for yourself?”

Geralt looks down to the dagger. After a moment, he shakes his head, then extends the dagger to Ciri.

“For you,” he says, when she doesn’t take it right away, looking down at it between them like it’s about to implode. “It’s not a trap. Or training. Just a knife.”

Ciri takes the knife, bright green eyes focused on Geralt’s face rather than on the gift. She waits until she’s had it in her hands for a couple of moments before turning her eyes down on it. Her small fingers pull the knife from its sheath, turning the blade over once it's free so she can see the sunlight gleam off of it.

“Look at those beautiful little emeralds in the hilt, darling,” Jaskier comments, fingertips dancing over the back of Ciri’s hand. He scoops her face in close and kisses her cheek. “They look just like your eyes. Don’t you think, Geralt?”

“Hmm,” Geralt agrees. They do resemble her eyes, actually, but she has such brilliantly bright eyes. They’re nearly impossible to hide, even with a disguise.

Ciri doesn’t answer. She’s being suspiciously silent, actually, and it gives Geralt an edge of nervousness, like he’s made a misstep.

“If you don’t like it, we can try a different weapon,” Geralt suggests. “I thought it might be time to take you on a contracted hunt.” Ciri’s head snaps up, teary eyes fixed on him, and he adds, “Nothing complicated or dangerous. Just to introduce you to it.”

Ciri finally moves, throwing herself into his lap, her arms locked tight around his neck. She says, voice so excited it nearly breaks, “Thank you so much, Father.”

Geralt’s heart catches in his chest. He hears the same thing happen to Jaskier, but his doesn’t calm back down, rabbiting in his chest. Geralt opens his eyes over Ciri’s head to look up at him and finds him waving Geralt off, wiping at his eyes with the back of his wrist.

“You’re welcome, Ciri,” Geralt tells her. She clings to him still, doesn’t let go, so he puts his arms around her tight and strokes her hair back, feeling the braids Jaskier put in bumping up under his fingers.

Ciri sniffles, then backs up, lifting her head. She wipes at her face with the flat of her palm, something Jaskier would typically scold her for, but Geralt just tucks her head under his and kisses the crown of her head. Her face buries in his throat, then drags up against his cheek, nuzzling into him. Geralt hears Jaskier sigh lightly.

“The green tunics I make for you will match so nicely with your eyes and your new little dagger, Ciri, darling,” Jaskier tells her. She separates from Geralt, wiping at her face again. Jaskier tsks at her, despite his own tears, pulling her hand from her face and tugging his handkerchief from his pocket to dry her face for her. Ciri bats at him, but he grips her chin to keep her in place. “Hold tight, you’ll feel much better once you’re clean.”

Ciri sighs, slumping in his hold and looking exasperatedly back at Geralt over her shoulder. “Can we go on the hunt  _ tonight?” _

“Young miss, you take that back, or I won’t sing for you tonight,” Jaskier tells her. Ciri turns in his lap, already apologizing, and Jaskier draws her in close, pressing a loud kiss to her temple. Nobody comments on Ciri’s calling Geralt  _ Father,  _ something she’s never done before, despite Jaskier playfully referring to him as such a thousand and one times. Geralt doesn’t fully understand the feeling brimming over inside of him, but it settles a bit on the surface watching Ciri test her knife on the side of the trunk.

“You’d never stop singing to punish me anyways,” Ciri comments when Geralt’s skinning the rabbit that night. She’s sprawled in Jaskier’s lap while he tunes his lute, strings sending vibrating notes echoing through the darkness. “You like bothering Father with it too much.”

Jaskier’s fingers catch on his lute. He picks up without missing a single note on his scales, but Geralt still hears them slip. When he looks up across the fire at Jaskier, he finds he’s already looking back, blue eyes glistening in the firelight.

“You’re right, darling, I most certainly do,” Jaskier agrees. Something warmer than the fire glows in Geralt’s belly. “Your father means everything to me.” He smiles, then adds, “Particularly when he’s annoyed.”

Geralt grunts, returning his attention down to the rabbit in his hands. Jaskier starts strumming an actual song now, he and Ciri both singing along. When Geralt cooks the rabbit over the fire, Ciri adds some of the spices from Jaskier’s pack to the meat. After he gives her her share — more than his and Jaskier’s, by mutual agreement — she uses her blade to cut the meat. A rabid little royal creature eating meat spiced with Jaskier’s nutmeg off the point of her dagger.

“Come here, darling,” Jaskier murmurs, dabbing at Ciri’s chin with his handkerchief. Geralt goes back to eating with his own dagger and hands, wondering, not for the first time, if he’s setting a good enough example. With how strong and sweet Ciri is, all at once, he thinks — he hopes — that he must be.

Manners aside, at least, and that’s all Jaskier’s responsibility in the end, anyways.

* * *

Geralt and Ciri take two days longer than he thought they would hunting a nest of ghouls.

At first, Geralt had thought it was just a couple of rogue ghouls, drawn closer because of the bodies hanging along the edge of town. He’d seen them on the way into the village, strung up and labeled as thieves and deserters. It’s something he tries to warn people against. Things like that only attract corpse-eaters, and ghouls are the least of what they’ll get, if they’re lucky.

What he thought was a couple of ghouls turned out to be a slumbering nest of the things, and Geralt feels that he has to set a good example by not just rushing in and slashing the things to death. Instead, he spends three nights teaching Ciri how to track the ghouls, how to stay hidden from them, how to trap them, how to kill them. She kills two of her own to his eight, and, together, they explode the nest. Ciri stands a bit too close to the explosion, gets splattered with bits of leaves and ghouls’ guts, but she turns to him with a wide grin, delighted, and he can’t help but smile back.

“Did you see that?” Ciri demands. She darts to his side, dagger held tight in her hand. “I took down  _ two!  _ And pretty much three, because I got that one right in the neck before you took its head off and it would’ve died anyways if you hadn’t done that.”

“Make each death as quick as possible,” Geralt instructs her. He directs her to one of the ghouls. “You want to harvest their blood as quickly afterwards as possible.” Holding an open bottle below the ghoul and slitting its throat to fill the vessel, Geralt tells her, “Ghoul blood is useful as an alchemical ingredient. Together with sewant mushrooms and Dwarven spirits, you can use it to create Black Blood.”

“What’s Black Blood?” Ciri asks, passing him another bottle from his pack when he extends his hand to her.

“A potion that will turn blood to poison,” Geralt explains. He stops up the bottles of ghoul blood and packs them away. When he looks back down at Ciri, she’s absolutely drenched in blood and gore, her fine silver hair stained red and plastered to her skull. She grins up at him when she notices him making eye contact, her eyes and teeth brilliantly white through the viscera.

“Now what?” Ciri asks.

“Now we go back to camp,” Geralt tells her. He heaves himself up to his feet. Ciri clambers up after him, not seeming a bit exhausted with adrenaline still thrumming through her from the battle with the ghouls.

On the walk back up to the main road, Ciri puts most of her attention on cleaning her blade, wiping it off over and over again with the clean inside edges of her tunic. It’ll be difficult to clean, but she’s the one who’ll have to clean it, so he leaves her to it. Once they’re actually on the path, walking in the sinking light of the full moon and rising light of dawn as it comes up with the sun, Ciri looks up at him.

“How did I do?” she asks. “Is there anything I should do better? I thought I kind of messed up when I was chasing after that one, but I was worried that it was heading for the village and I got nervous and I thought, you know—”

“Ciri,” Geralt cuts her off. “You talk more than Jaskier.”

Ciri’s quiet for a moment before she says, “Don’t say that, he never stops talking.”

“Hmm.” Geralt fights back a smile, trying not to encourage that. “In a fight, there isn’t much time to talk. Or to think. You have to do what you think is best, and move forward from there.” He stops on the road and looks down at her. The way she looks back up at him, waiting eagerly for whatever other wisdom and advice he’ll give her, wrings out his chest. He sets a hand on her shoulder and tells her, “You have to act without regrets. If you can live with yourself, you’ve done all you can do. Do you understand?”

Ciri nods. After a moment, she glances down, then back up. Briefly, she worries her bottom lip between her teeth, before she wrinkles her face up at the bitter taste of the ghoul blood on her face.

“If you have a question, ask it,” Geralt tells her. “I will never judge you for your questions.”

Ciri nods again, rocking back on her heels. She still takes a second to align her words, but she finally asks him, “What happens if I make a mistake? If I— I don’t know, what if I hurt someone or something?”

Geralt studies her face. He gets to his knees to put them on an equal level.

“In your life, there will always be people you’ll hurt,” Geralt tells her. “And people who will hurt you. It’s horrible, but it’s life. If you have good intentions, others will see that. More importantly, you will know that.”

“But what if that’s not enough?” Ciri asks. “If I’m going to mess up anyways. What’s it matter what I meant to do if I didn’t do it right? If I mess it all up and I scream or something and somebody gets hurt, what do I do then?”

“That’s where you have to learn from your mistakes and apologize,” Geralt tells her.

“What should I say?” Ciri asks.

“Hmm.” Geralt thinks about this for a moment, then says, “That’s a question better suited for Jaskier. He’s better at… words.”

“You’re right,” Ciri agreed. She smiles at him, and he smiles back. Jaskier told him it would encourage her if he smiled more often around her, and besides, he feels more and more like smiling the longer he’s around the both of them anyways.

As it turns out, Jaskier was right, and the smile apparently encourages Ciri even further: she throws her arms around him and hugs him tight. He pats her back over her small set of armor, secured tight in place still after the fight. Geralt makes a mental note to ask Jaskier in which city he had had it made; it might be a good idea to have a second set made, just in case. It wouldn’t be too much of a burden for him to carry, and he wouldn’t want her to spend too long unprotected, should anything happen to the first set.

Geralt is so lost in thought, for a moment, that he doesn’t notice Ciri’s sharp inhale right away. It registers a beat later, and he’s already standing, withdrawing his silver sword.

“What is it?” Geralt asks. He can’t see anything or hear anyone; there’s nothing living to sense that he thinks Ciri could have seen.

“Up there,” Ciri tells him. With a trembling hand, she points high past his head, and Geralt whirls. “Is— Is—”

Ciri doesn’t finish, breath catching in her throat. Geralt has to block the sun from his eyes and let his vision clear before he can properly focus on what she’s seeing, but, when he sees it, his breath catches, too.

Along the path into the village, still, just as there was when they first came into town, are the hanging posts. Skeletons and half-rotting corpses and fresh bodies all strung up just the same as the last. The oldest bodies are the closest to them; farther away, though, towards the end of the line of hanging bodies, swinging in the day’s first stirrings of wind, are the newest bodies, only just hanged in the last day or so. At the very end of the line is a body with a bag over its head like all the rest. Its body, though, is clothed in a brilliant red doublet and pants to match, sleeves puffed up, the entire ensemble stitched with gold thread. Geralt remembers Jaskier selecting the fabric in a market, exclaiming with delight about how well it would match the thread he’d woven for himself.

“No,” Geralt says. “That’s… not Jaskier. That man is too small.”

“Those are  _ Jaskier’s clothes,”  _ Ciri points out, heartbeat picking up faster and faster in Geralt’s ears. He can hear her blood rushing as her heart pumps it quick with adrenaline, but he forces himself to stay calm. It won’t help her to see him fall to pieces over nothing.

Geralt can’t take his eyes off the body. It has to be too small to be Jaskier’s. It has to be too slim, too narrow; it can’t be his, because it  _ can’t be his. _

“Jaskier is still at camp, where we left him,” Geralt tells her. Ciri’s already run away from him, darting over to the notice posted beneath the body, tearing it from its nail. She reads it hastily, then cranes her neck up, tears streaming down her bloody face, leaving clean trails behind. The steps she takes backwards nearly tip her over; Geralt has to run to steady her, tilting her face back down. “Don’t look at them.”

“It’s  _ Jaskier!”  _ Ciri screams, and Geralt’s knocked back a couple of steps with the force of her magic. She looks impossibly startled, for a beat, before she starts crying again, running into Geralt’s arms. He covers her face, turning it into his armor; the blood’s better than her seeing this.

Geralt’s heart is still too fast as he takes the crumpled notice from Ciri’s fist. The semi-elegant script reads,  _ “This individual has been sentenced to death by hanging for spreading defeatism, falsehoods, and slander against the Throne.”  _ Before he knows it,  _ Igni  _ is flying through his fingers and scorching the paper into nothing but ashes, crumbling to the ground. Ciri’s still sobbing, face buried in his armor, and so Geralt steels himself before he forces himself to look up.

The body is too high up to cut down without climbing the thing. The shoes on the thing are unfamiliar, at least, and Geralt clings to that as he tries to examine the corpse from directly underneath it. He refuses to think of it as Jaskier. It’s  _ not  _ Jaskier. It’s some other poor idiot who thought those colors would look nice, some other fool who spoke slander against the crown, someone who was in this town in those clothes and was hanged for spreading falsehoods—

“We’ll return to the woods,” Geralt tells her. “We’ll find Jaskier at camp and you’ll see. Everything is okay.”

“We can’t go back to the  _ woods,  _ we have to cut him down!” Ciri insists. “We have to bury him, Geralt, please, or burn him, we can’t leave him up there—”

“Ciri,” Geralt cuts her off. She looks at him sharply, all rage and frustration, grief already filling her face. Looking at that, Geralt starts to feel her fear, too, stronger than before. It pushes him to do the last thing he’d wanted to do, but he knows he has to do it. Hesitantly, he lifts his head and scents the air above them.

It smells obviously of decaying corpse, dead and dying things. The stench of rotdeath hangs like a heavy perfume around this entire section of the path, but, through it, he smells the sweet scent of Jaskier’s perfume. It’s piercing, but he can’t smell all of Jaskier, can’t smell his buttercup-warmth, and a lightning strike of a thought makes him wonder if that was Jaskier’s living scent and, without life, he’s just this. Just nothing, nothing that made him  _ him,  _ anymore.

Except it can’t be Jaskier, because the body isn’t large enough and he doesn’t recognize the shoes and it doesn’t smell quite right, and so Jaskier is somewhere safe and this is just some misunderstanding. It has to be a misunderstanding.

“We can’t leave him,” Ciri begs him tearfully. Geralt crouches down and scoops her up against his chest, clutching her tight. She beats at his chest, trying to shove him off so she can get to the ground, but he doesn’t let her go. He just tucks her head under his chin so she won’t look up at the body again and starts walking as quickly as he can.

Ciri stops fighting, once they get to the treeline, but she doesn’t stop crying. When the terrain gets too rocky again, he sets her down on her feet. She’s compelled almost instantly to dart in front of him, running as fast as she can back for the campsite they made. The further they get, the higher the sun gets in the sky, and the more concerned Geralt grows. He starts to think,  _ should I have heard Jaskier’s heart by now? Should I have smelled him by now? Should I have heard Roach? Did we pass this spot on the way in? _

Doubting himself in a way he hasn’t in some time. It’s heavy, weighing on him more and more with each step. Ciri disappears out of his vision for just a moment, over the crest of a hill, and it makes panic spark so strongly in his chest that he barks out, “Ciri, get  _ back  _ here,” more sharply than he means to.

Ciri clambers back up over the hill. She studies him for a moment, then steps forward and slips her hand into his. She tugs him forward, running with his hand in hers through the trees back for their campsite. If they were more focused right now, he’d correct her tracking skills, but as it is, he’s just proud she’s keeping up with him as he starts to go faster.

“Jaskier?” Ciri calls into the woods. Geralt wants to shush her, but her voice is higher than his, and Jaskier is more likely to hear it, if he’s nearby.  _ “Jaskier!” _

_ “Jaskier,”  _ Geralt echoes.

They’re not close enough yet, and still, the lack of response is unsettling. Jaskier often wanders from camp, so why hasn’t he  _ this  _ time? They’re two days late; even though Geralt had told Jaskier that was a possibility, Jaskier could have decided to come find them, or maybe decided to go to an inn and make some extra coin for them, and there ran into soldiers and that’s where he committed his crime—

_ “Jaskier!”  _ Geralt calls again. Ciri pulls him forward, trying to run faster even though she’s panting for breath as it is. Geralt won’t let her go any quicker than that, won’t let her destroy her stamina that way, but he wants more still to just haul her up and run through the woods as fast as he possibly can.

They’re starting to get close to the campsite, Geralt realizes, when he scents Jaskier’s perfume and Roach and Ciri’s soaps and spiced meat. There’s no scent of campfire, but it’s a warm day, and Jaskier probably wouldn’t start one unnecessarily, Geralt tells himself. Tries to tell himself.  _ Tells himself.  _ Ciri keeps calling Jaskier’s name, screaming into the wind just below the octave that would knock birds out of the air.

Geralt thinks he hears a voice call back to them. He can’t run at Ciri’s pace anymore, and he scoops her up, breaking into a sprint for their camp. Ducking under branches, hurtling logs, running closer and closer until he’s breaking through the treeline into their camp, nestled amongst the pines. Roach huffs at him, snorting, bewildered at his sudden and disgusting appearance.

Miraculously, Jaskier looks up at him, too, standing over a mussed bedroll. His hair’s a mess, he’s rubbing at his face with one hand, and he’s  _ alive.  _ Geralt can hear his heartbeat, can smell him, the  _ alive  _ smell of him, natural buttercup sweetness, fresh with just having woken up.

Jaskier’s nose wrinkles up at the sight of them. As soon as they’re close enough that Ciri could hear him, Jaskier says, “What  _ happened  _ to you? You’re  _ disgusting.” _ He spots Ciri in Geralt’s arms and asks, “Is she okay? Geralt, if she got hurt, I swear, I’ll never for—”

_ “Father,” _ Ciri cries, shoving off of Geralt so hard he has no choice but to drop her to her feet. She sprints from him for Jaskier, crossing the distance between them in fast little strides until she can bury her face in his chest, throwing her arms around him and hanging on tight. She sobs into him, soaking into the grey chemise he’s wearing, obviously one of Geralt’s.

“What?” Jaskier asks weakly. His face is already pinked, eyes red as he leans back to cup Ciri’s face in his hand, heedless of the gore soaked into her skin as he demands, “Ciri, darling, what’s happened to you?” Geralt’s nearly to them; Jaskier looks up to him, asks, “Is everything alright? The two of you look like you’ve seen a ghost—”

Geralt crashes into them, pulling Jaskier and Ciri both into his embrace. Ciri’s still hiccuping with tears, fists twisted up in Jaskier’s— Geralt’s— chemise. It’s all Geralt can do to steady her.

“What happened?” Jaskier asks, sounding panicked and halfway to terrified. “Geralt, answer me, you’re scaring me. You’re not hurt, are you? Did something happen? Did someone see Cirilla?”

“No,” Geralt tells him. He separates them so he can pull Jaskier into a hard kiss, as deep and hard as he can with Ciri between them. She pushes at Geralt, and Jaskier breaks the kiss, reluctantly, after a moment. All Geralt’s succeeded in doing is smearing ghoul guts and blood all over him, marring that buttercup scent he thought he’d never smell again, as he pulls Jaskier’s forehead in to his, holding him there by the back of his neck. Jaskier exhales shakily. Geralt sees his hand slip to grip Ciri’s shoulder, holding her close still.

“We saw someone hanged up on the way here wearing your red clothes,” Ciri tells him, voice muffled by his chest, face still buried there. “And I thought it was you, I swear that I haven’t been so frightened since— Since I—”

Geralt can see Calanthe’s dead, snow-sodden face in his mind’s eye. He knows Jaskier is thinking something similar, because he pulls away from Geralt to kneel before Ciri instead. There, right in the grass and dirt, he pulls her into his lap and starts shushing her, stroking her bloody hair back from where it's stuck to her face and shoulders. He presses his cheek to the crown of her head, humming softly as her tears start to slow. Jaskier’s face is wet himself, but he’s not paying it any mind.

He does look up to Geralt, eyes searching. With one blood-stained hand, he reaches out, beckons Geralt forward, says, “Come here and sit, you silly man, you look like you’re about to fall right over. When’s the last time you two even slept?”

“We rested before the hunt,” Geralt assures him. “What happened to you? Why were your clothes…”  _ On a hanged man,  _ he doesn’t ask, because there’s still that errant stick of fear that smelled Jaskier’s perfume on the red silk body dangling above him and hasn’t completely let it go yet.

“Oh, please, you won’t even believe this,” Jaskier tells him. “The silliest thing, I brought Roach down to the river with me just so I could keep an eye on her while I washed some of our clothes, and some— some  _ hooligans  _ came up and tried to grab her, so I,  _ obviously,  _ frightened them off, but not before they’d instead decided to snatch up some of our clothes from the rocks I’d been drying them on.” Jaskier sighs, sounding put-upon. “Sounds like one of them met a rather unfortunate end. Pity.”

“They stole from us,” Geralt reminds him.

“They stole a few articles of clothing,” Jaskier points out. “They were hardly hardened criminals. What was he hanged for, anyways? Did he have a notice, or was he just one of those tree fellows? I have to say, I dread ending up like one of them, you know, all—”

_ “Jaskier,” _ Geralt cuts him off. He starts to say more, then stops. Words don’t put sense to his rushing thoughts, so he doesn’t try. Jaskier seems to understand him anyways, reaching out to stroke Geralt’s cheek. It calms him down, and Geralt leans into his touch, turning his face into his palm.

“I’m so sorry you were so frightened,” Jaskier says. After a beat, he releases Geralt and looks away, down at Ciri, so Geralt can pretend he was saying it to her, if he wants to. Ciri lifts her head to look at him when he shifts back. “I am not going anywhere without your consent, Princess Cirilla, I can assure you of that. How dare I presume to leave without having completed my duties to you?”

“You don’t have any duties to me,” Ciri points out. Jaskier gasps, cupping Ciri’s face in his hands and shifting her off his lap so he can kneel in front of her insistently. She laughs, despite herself, at his theatrics; Geralt smiles. It all feels soap-bubble joyous.

“I have  _ every  _ duty to you, Princess,” Jaskier tells her. “I am duty- and honor-bound to raise you into the strongest and kindest ruler you can be— Though, to be honest, you’re doing a good enough job of it on your own already, don’t you think, Geralt—”

“No, but you aren’t  _ actually, _ I mean,” Ciri pushes. Geralt can tell what she’s doing, even if she can’t. Jaskier strokes her hair back again, tries to clean her face with his thumbs. It doesn’t work, because of  _ course  _ it doesn’t, she’s still dripping in blood, but it’s tender, and she relaxes into it.

“I do not have to be bound to you by the Law of Surprise or by blood or by any old thing to be bound to you,” Jaskier tells her. “Darling, I love you. There’s no force in the world that’s stronger than that, not even destiny, you understand me?”

“Yes, Father,” Ciri whispers. Jaskier presses their foreheads together, just like Geralt had done with him, and Ciri slumps into him, letting Jaskier hold up her weight.

“I am here because I want to be,” Jaskier whispers back. Over the top of her head, he looks to Geralt. His eyes are so earnest, so blue, locked on him. Geralt feels like they’re together in the middle distance, not so far apart, when Jaskier says, starting to overflow, “You’re my family. You’re both my family.”

Geralt nods. He kneels behind Ciri, sets a hand on her back and waits her out, lets her take her comfort from them until she’s calmed down again. When her heartbeat is calm in her chest, Geralt lifts his head and his hand, looks to Jaskier. His face is streaked with tears, but he waves off Ciri’s concern and Geralt’s thumb, when he brushes it under Jaskier’s eye.

“Please,” Jaskier says. His voice breaks, and he exhales slowly. “You’ve both just taken me by surprise this morning, my  _ goodness,  _ what a wake-up you’ve given me.” He throws his hands up, looking them both over as he lets them fall back down to rest on his hips. “You know, you’re both completely  _ disgusting  _ messes, and you’ve made me one, too? After I  _ just  _ washed our clothes. This is terrible.” Jaskier tsks at them, then declares, “Alright, we’re going down to the river for a bath. I’m bringing the soaps.”

“I’ll carry the bag,” Ciri insists, snatching it up before Jaskier can. Her dagger’s in her other hand, already unsheathed.

“Cirilla, darling, no bandits will attack me while the two of you are protecting me,” Jaskier assures her. “Why don’t you tuck that away? Your father carries his swords everywhere he goes anyways, doesn’t he, big menacing man-wolf that he is—”

“What if something happens to you?” Ciri demands.

“Well, then, Geralt will give them a good whack with his sword and I will frighten them off if they haven’t gotten the message,” Jaskier says.

“And what if—”

“Then you will  _ scream,”  _ Jaskier tells her. “Princess, if something happens to the both of us and you’re left alone, you just scream at the top of your lungs. You don’t worry about being a lady, you hear me? You just look out for  _ you.” _

“Okay,” Ciri agrees. She sheathes her dagger, then reconsiders and strips the sheath off altogether, along with her armor. Geralt follows suit, leaving the heaviest pieces and their bags behind. Jaskier takes all their things to wash while they scrub down, but Geralt still brings his swords, both steel and silver, just in case.

“And besides,” Jaskier says merrily, when he’s finally in the water and dumping a wooden bucket of water over Ciri’s head, helping to wash the soap and ghoul blood from her hair, “I don’t want you to worry about a thing, Ciri.  _ I  _ am the one protecting  _ you.  _ Not the other way around.”

Ciri looks to Geralt, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes. Geralt hesitates, then shakes his head.

“I know what you’re doing, Geralt,” Jaskier says without turning around, digging soap into Ciri’s scalp to wash out the last ghoul bits. “Don’t you make me come over there.”

Geralt winks at Ciri, making her dissolve into laughter and giving Jaskier no choice but to take his bucket and dump it over Geralt’s head, instead. In turn, Geralt hauls Jaskier up by the waist, turns, and flings him backwards into the water, submerging him in seconds. Jaskier breaks the surface again, gasping for air, spluttering indignantly at Geralt.

“Father,  _ stop,”  _ Ciri exclaims, shrieking with laughter.

Jaskier absolutely melts, cooing as he goes right to her, ruffling her hair before he gets back to work washing it out. Geralt’s not sure which one of them she was referring to, and it doesn’t bother him in the least. In fact, it’s the most settled he’s felt in months now, he thinks. Maybe years.

_ “Father,”  _ Ciri repeats. Geralt dunks his head under the water to wet his hair, then joins them, waiting his turn behind Ciri to get his hair washed out.

**Author's Note:**

> You can (and should!) come follow me on Twitter at [@nicole__mello](https://twitter.com/nicole__mello) and/or on Tumblr at [andillwriteyouatragedy](http://andillwriteyouatragedy.tumblr.com/).


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